Christopher movie review: Unnikrishnan and Udaykrishna take a step forward as Mammootty takes two steps back

Christopher is the head of the Division for Preventing Crime Against Women (DPCAW) and an encounter specialist. As the tagline of the movie suggests, he is a vigilante cop who proudly takes the law into his own hands when he feels like the accused persons in rape/assault cases are likely to go unpunished owing to their financial background and other factors. Christopher is such an ‘encounterist’ that he guns down four youngsters, accused of raping and murdering a young woman, in the first 15 minutes of the film itself.

Soon after, the CM (Siddique) is pressured by Home Secretary Beena Mariam Chacko (Sneha) to launch an investigation into the deaths of these four youngsters. They deploy a team, headed by the sharp ACP Sulekha (Amala Paul) who decides to not stop the probe by looking into just this case alone but to unearth all previous encounters carried out by Christopher. The first half of the film progresses as Sulekha learns about Christopher’s past from various people who were previously associated with him and who are knowledgeable about such cases.

Unlike Aaraattu, when director B Unnikrishnan and writer Udaykrishna joined hands the last time, Christopher moves at a faster pace with no unnecessary (misogynistic) dialogues.

Christopher is a sharp yet calm and profound police officer, totally dissimilar to the characters one usually finds in Udaykrishna movies. He doesn’t speak much, never cracks lame jokes, and the best part is that he is not a secret agent from any of the central forces. Phew!

He decided to join the force after witnessing a cop (a cameo appearance by Tamil actor Sarathkumar) execute the two men who raped and murdered his entire family. Yes, his motive to become a cop itself is problematic. As the core memory of his life is a cop delivering immediate justice to him, Christopher also carries it forward even after becoming a high-ranking officer in the department.

Despite the fact that Christopher delves into its theme immediately and maintains the same tone throughout, without giving any mass introduction scenes or punch dialogues to superstar Mammootty, unlike other Udaykrishna cop movies such as Masterpiece, Aaraattu, and Monster, it soon starts going round and round without settling anywhere.

Characters, rape cases, and extrajudicial killings keep happening without giving the viewers any time to process even a single one of them. In fact, the number of encounter killings per square foot in this movie is so high that, after a point, one would probably lose track of how many people the cop gunned down.

The antagonist in the film Trimurthi Aiyer (Vinay Rai), after a massive introduction in the first five minutes, makes a proper appearance only in the second half of the film. Even after his arrival, the film fails to get back on its feet. The confrontations between Christopher and Trimurthi rarely make any impact and the dialogues of both Christopher and Trimurthi in these scenes are very sloppy.

The only place where the film succeeds is as a cop movie. It never tries to go beyond that. There are no unnecessary subplots or love stories. But what does it lack? Pretty much everything.

Though Udaykrishna, considering his track record, has done a decent job, the story is filled with too many characters and incidents that one doesn’t get time to empathise with any of them. After the colossal failure of Aaraattu, director Unnikrishnan appears to have played it safe here by repeating certain elements that worked for him while making Grandmaster (2012). Christopher might remind you of the Mohanlal-starrer in many places, including the appearances of both Mammootty and Sneha, which are very similar to that of Mohanlal and Priyamani in Grandmaster. The film also reminds one of Atlee’s Tamil movie Theri, starring Vijay, at certain points.

Even with its running time of close to two-and-a-half hours, the film’s climax got over in the blink of an eye, leaving the viewers wondering what just happened.

Above all that, the extremely graphic rape and assault scenes in this film are unbearable. Though ‘woke’ male filmmakers pretending to stand for women’s rights and then filming rape scenes in a graphic manner is not new, Christopher takes it forward by many miles.

Even though the movie is about how women are denied justice, the female characters in the film are very shallow and almost insignificant. Even Amala Paul’s ACP Sulekha, in spite of the actor doing a neat job, struggles throughout the running time to make her presence felt. While Sneha gets some screentime, it feels like Aishwarya Lekshmi’s Aamina Ismail was introduced only to be raped and killed in no time so that Christopher can carry out one more encounter.

For Mammootty, who has been receiving a lot of appreciation for choosing films wisely and his performances in films like Puzhu, Rorschach and Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam, Christopher is indeed a step back in terms of picking quality content, although the actor did a clean job in the flick.

Surprisingly, despite being a cop film, Christopher has only a few action sequences, which have been decently choreographed.

In short, Christopher is a movie that people are going to like, not because it is great, but because the last few films of both the director and the screenwriter were abysmal.